Father Figure
by CheerfulChemist
Summary: This is a one shot speculation about what happened to Castle. It is immediately post the S6 finale and incorporates spoilers that are currently available. Something from Castle's early life has caused him to be abducted. He struggles to be free while Kate searches for him. I hope to make this converge with S7. I own nothing. Follow me on Twitter @CheerfulChemist


Father Figure

Blindfolded, Richard Castle listened for any clue to where the black SUV was taking him. He was sore from the impact of the airbags when two men with guns had run him off the road before pulling him out of the car. He supposed he should be grateful they pulled him out. The leaking gasoline had exploded, sending flames shooting throughout the Mercedes. But he couldn't be grateful. He had been twenty minutes away from Kate, twenty minutes from the union he had been waiting for his entire life. Now they were taking him away from her and he had no idea where he was going or why.

The road under the tires of the SUV became increasingly rough, the jostling of the car enhancing the pain of every bruise. The smell of manure drifted in through the car's ventilation system. Someone was growing something, keeping horses, or both. Castle stored that clue away. If somehow he could reach Kate, anyone from the 12th or even Chief Brady, it would help them to find him. He just had to stay awake and alert. That soon became impossible. He felt the jab of a needle in his arm, and then nothing.

The room tilted at a crazy angle and spun, forcing the contents of Castle's stomach upwards. He tried to fight it, but the vertigo overcame his will. "Just let it go," a voice nearby came softly. A wastebasket was pushed under his chin, as the sickness wracked his body. Slowly, slowly, it stopped as the room ceased its motion.

Castle looked for the source of the voice. The woman was a little younger than he and her eyes looked familiar somehow. There was a moon-shaped birthmark on her cheek that he remembered from so many years ago. "Christina?" he asked.

"It's me, Rick," she confirmed.

"Where are we?" He asked. "What am I doing here?"

"I don't know," Christina answered. "I was blindfolded and drugged like you were. That's how I knew you'd be sick. I was. Are you feeling better?"

Rick slowly nodded his head, relieved that the room stayed in place. "How long have you been here?" Castle asked.

"About two weeks," Christina answered. "They've been asking me about Michael. I don't know the answers to any of their questions, but they just keep asking. Maybe that's why they took you. We hung around with him the same time. Maybe they think you know something I don't."

"I don't understand," Castle told her. "I just remember Michael letting us play the video games he invented and asking us to test cookie recipes. What's to know? Christina, this makes no sense. We've got to get out of here."

"I don't know how," Christina protested, on the edge of tears. "The doors and windows are all sealed and wired with alarms. I've looked. I've listened. There doesn't seem to be anything around for miles. There's no road noise, nothing."

Castle put a hand on her shoulder. "Hey, little sister, I've been solving mysteries for the NYPD for six years now and writing them a lot longer. We're going to figure this out, and we're going to get out of here."

The door was flung open and the two men Castle recognized from the SUV grabbed him by the elbows. He was taken to a sparsely furnished room and pushed into a chair which reminded Castle of those he had seen in medical labs. Castle caught the odor of garlic, followed by the entrance of its consumer. "Monsieur Rodgers," he addressed Castle.

"It's Castle," Rick corrected.

"Yes of course," the man agreed, "but during the events that concern us, you were Richard Rodgers, n'est pas? You knew a Michael Bellows."

"Yes," Castle confirmed. "All the kids in the building knew Michael. That's hardly a reason to kidnap me."

"We will see," the man assured him. "When you visited with Michael Bellows, what did you do?"

"I played video games. They were pretty primitive then, on floppy disks. Lousy graphics! They'd never make it in today's market," Castle remarked. "I'm an X-box man myself."

"What else did you do?" the man asked.

"Ate cookies," Castle answered. "I know, you're the food police, right? I'm under arrest for having too much sugar as a kid."

"Very amusing, Monsieur Castle," the man commented with no trace of a smile. "You had something, but it wasn't sugar. Now, what was it like playing the video games?"

"It was fun," Castle told him. "I was a twelve year old kid and it was fun."

"You don't remember anything else about it?" the man asked.

"No," Castle insisted, "so if that's what you needed to know, I am very very late for my wedding and my bride carries a gun."

"Oh I know she does, Monsieur Castle," the man assured him, with the first sickening appearance of a smile. "But she will not find you here. No one will, and we have a great deal to do."

The two thugs from the SUV held Castle in his chair and once more a needle was shoved in his arm.

Castle came to consciousness slowly. This time the room was still - and dark. Outside the windows lay nothing but black. Castle was vaguely aware of his empty stomach. He had no idea how long it might have been since he actually ate anything. It had been long before he had seen the judge that morning, if it had been that morning. Turning on a light at his bedside, he checked the time and calendar on his watch, a little surprised that he was still wearing it. It was almost midnight on what should have been his wedding day. He should have been holding Kate in his arms. Instead, his arms held only the marks of a needle. On the small desk in the room lay a tray with bread, cheese, and fruit. Despite the emptiness in his gut, the bile rising in his throat made touching it impossible.

After a night of shadows of a nameless menace descending on Castle in the dark, the first rays of dawn began to filter into the room. Castle startled as the door to his room opened gently, but caught his breath when he realized that it was Christina. "Are you okay Rick?" she asked. "I saw them take you to the room that Marcel uses."

"Who's Marcel?" Castle asked.

"The man who asks all the questions. He has an accent like a hockey player."

"Oh yes," Castle agreed. "Garlic breath. He asked me about Michael too. It made no sense. What possible interest could anyone have in obsolete video games and mediocre cookies? Although he seemed to think there was something in the cookies. Does that make any sense to you?"

Christina shook her head. "They were just cookies." She caught sight of the untouched tray. "You should eat something though. It will make you feel better after the needles. The food here actually isn't bad. They may be scuzzballs, but they have good taste."

Castle shook his head. "The only thing that's going to make me feel better is getting out of here. I was supposed to be getting married yesterday. My fiancée, my family, are out there wondering what happened to me. They might even think I died in a car wreck. I have to let them know I'm all right. We need to get you out of here too."

"Rick there's no way. They don't lock the doors of our rooms because they don't have to. If we even try to get away, alarms will go off all over the place and they'll be on top of us. I know. I tried," Christina confided.

"There's got to be a way," Castle insisted "and I'm going to keep trying."

"Well there's coffee downstairs," Christina offered. "You ought to at least have some of that. You're going to need it."

"Okay sis," Castle agreed. "I want to look around down there anyway."

Castle descended the stairs cautiously. The house had an old feel, the wood worn by many steps, the plasterwork crafted with the skills of a bygone era. The technology, he noted, as he checked what Christina had told him, was brand new. Wires embedded in the windows and doors would scream to an alarm when a door was opened, a sash was lifted, or glass broken. He made a careful mental inventory of everything he saw as he found the coffee Christina had described. It was slightly bitter. His tongue and nose identified it as French Roast, not his favorite, but warm and energizing. There were bagels also, not like those from New York City, but smaller, sweeter and with a bigger hole. He recognized them as popular in Montreal and wondered if more than Marcel's accent was French Canadian. He had no way of knowing how long he had been out. They could have driven him to an agricultural area with a private airstrip and flown him out of New York. That might have accounted for the smell of manure. The flight would have been a short one. There would have been no TSA and nominal or no customs. Unconscious from the drugs, he never would have known. If that was true, Beckett would be looking in the wrong place. He could be in a place where he had no friends, except for Christina and no one to fall back on but himself.

A rough voice Castle recognized as belonging to one of Marcel's thugs brought him out of his thoughts. "You! Time to go talk to the man."

Forced into the same chair, Castle was bombarded with the same questions about Michael Bellows. The only new information he provided was that the floppy disks had been old style five and a quarter inchers and the computer he had used them on had been a Tandy EX without even a hard drive.

Once more the needle pricked his arm.

Castle awoke at one in the afternoon. His mouth felt dry, as if he had been talking, but he couldn't remember saying more than a few sentences. This time he didn't try to resist the food and water on his tray. He would need all his strength to get out of this, especially if he was going to take Christina with him.

* * *

"Where's my father?" Alexis screamed at Kate, as Martha tried to calm her with a hand on her shoulder. "You're the detective! Why can't you find him?"

Kate spoke as calmly and as softly as she could, as tears from her own eyes threatened to match the ones streaming down Alexis' face. "Alexis, if I could, don't you think I would? I want him by my side for the rest of my life. We, all of us, worked so hard to make that happen. I keep thinking if I had another way of looking at the facts, I could find him, and I turn around to hear his theory. But he's not there, and I'm as lost as you are."

"This is all your fault!" Alexis accused. "If it hadn't been for your stupid marriage to Rogan O'Leary, Dad wouldn't have been on that road. He would have been safe with us at the house. This never would have happened."

"Alexis, you can't know that!" Martha protested. "We don't know why your father was taken. There's been no request for a ransom, nothing. Whoever did this could have taken him at any time."

Kate sank into a chair, her face in her hands. "No, Martha, she's right. He shouldn't have been on that road. We should have been together. I'm just out of ideas. The area has been searched and searched again. Everyone from the 12th has gone out to help. There's just no sign of him. The Hamptons police don't know what else to do, neither does our security consultant, and neither do I. I'm so sorry."

"How about an old enemy of my grandfather's, like when I was taken, or that 3XK who framed Dad for murder?" Alexis asked. "Have you checked on those?"

"Alexis, your grandfather called me," Martha confessed. "He knows nothing about what happened. He hasn't seen activity from any of his old enemies. He wants to help if he can, but he doesn't have any leads either."

"Ryan, Esposito, I, and even Captain Gates have all looked into 3XK," Kate added. "There is no evidence that he's anywhere near here. In fact, there have been two strings of murders on the West Coast that scream of his signature. If he is still alive, or has a disciple acting for him, that's where he seems to be. This is something else.

Martha, Castle still hasn't told me much about his history. Is there anything, anything at all that you can think of that was strange that happened to him or that he did? I know he was lonely as a kid. Maybe he connected with a cult or some group with strange interests?"

Martha rubbed her hands over a face that looked startlingly older, now free of its usual perfect makeup. "I was away so much just trying to make a living for so many of his early years. It's so hard to know. There is one group he used to hang out with when he was about twelve. A man in our building had an apartment. A lot of the kids used to go there. He had a computer before most people did. The kids played video games. I checked him out. He wasn't a pervert or anything else sinister. He was just kind of a father figure for Richard. Richard needed that, so I encouraged him to spend time there. He loved it. He talked a lot about the games. He thought of the other kids almost as brothers and sisters."

"No wonder he likes video games so much," Kate mused. Guilt washed over her for being so hard on Castle about his gaming activity. "Martha, this may be nothing, but we're grasping at anything right now. Do you remember the name of the man who had that apartment?"

Martha closed her eyes, doing her best to use the sense memory that served her so well as an actress. There was the smell of cookies drifting down the hall. Coming home from an audition she went in search of her son, following the scent. The door of the apartment opened at her knock and a man stood there. She greeted him. "Hi, Michael! Is Richard here?" Martha opened her eyes. "His name was Michael."

How about a last name?" Kate asked.

Martha tried again, picturing a row of mailboxes. She scanned the names against the battered brass. One name, neatly printed in blue stood out: "M. Bellows." She breathed a sigh of hope. "It was Bellows, Michael Bellows."

Kate leaned over the screen on her desk at the 12th. Coming back to work gave her access to resources she would not have had if she had remained on leave. She spent as much time as she could searching for Castle. She knew that Captain Gates noticed but carefully pretended that she didn't. For that, Kate was very grateful.

She had traced the Michael Bellows who lived in the rent controlled apartment in lower Manhattan in 1983. He had started a toy company with partner Wally Williger, one of the nascent ventures that worked on capitalizing on the growing trend of video gaming. He appeared to have been moderately successful, eventually selling out to a larger company in the late '90's. After that, he had completely fallen off the radar until a death certificate had been filed in 2014, shortly before Castle's abduction. It could be a coincidence, but Kate hoped that it wasn't. Something about Bellows' activities would have to lead her to Castle. She had nothing else. She pulled up Bellows' death certificate and went to see Lanie.

Lanie carefully examined Michael Bellows' file. "This wasn't my case Kate, and we we were working on the wedding when this happened. I wasn't paying attention to any cases but my own. This one should have been easy. The guy was past seventy and had all the signs of a heart attack. This was Cissy's case and she's pretty green. She didn't look for anything that might indicate anything other than natural causes. She had no reason to."

"But?" Kate prompted.

"The man's lytes were seriously out of balance and there was a puncture wound that was unaccounted for because his tox screen was clear. Someone could have given him an injection of potassium chloride and stopped his heart."

"Could you prove it, Lanie, if you exhumed the body?"

"It would be iffy, even if I had a body," Lanie answered. "The firm the body was released to specializes in cremation. You can check on it, but by now Michael Bellows is probably ashes."

After checking that Michael Bellows had indeed been returned to the dust from which he came, Beckett began to sift through everything she could find on his former company, finding a division in Trois Rivières Quebec, about a hundred miles from Montreal, that was started to market games based on those Bellows originally developed.

* * *

As Castle looked at his watch, he was amazed to see over a month had passed. The days had flowed into each other to the point where he barely perceived their passing. The routine of each day was the same. They would take him to the room with Marcel. He's be asked questions about Michael Bellows and drugged. He always woke up in his room hours later. He had more than adequate food to eat and they gave him clean clothes to wear, but he had no contact with the outside world. He and Christina talked, sometimes remembering old times, but she never had any information for him. He was still determined to find an escape and kept examining the house for a way out.

Finally, as he was taken for his daily interrogation, something happened to give him the germ of a plan. Marcel had just begun his usual string of questions when the lights went out. He sent one of his thugs to check out the source of the problem. The report Marcel received was in French, but Castle was able to understand enough of it to know that there was a short between the generator and the wiring in the house that had taken everything down. Power was restored shortly, but Castle hoped that if he could find a way to make such a thing happen again, perhaps in the middle of the night, the alarm system would be off and he could escape.

From that day on, he spent his unobserved time looking for the entry of the power to the house and a way to disable it. With the effects of the drugs, his sleep at night was fitful at best and often impossible. He used the time to check and double check until he was sure. The generator was situated in a barn not far from the house, most likely to avoid the chance of carbon monoxide poisoning in such a tightly sealed space. The power line ran through a conduit to a back corner of the house and inside into a box that contained circuit breakers. In order to blow the power in a way that could not easily be restored by flipping a breaker, he had to break the connection before it got to the box. That would give him a heavily insulated cable as a target. He would have to cut it quickly and as far into the night as he could.

A major complication was that any sharp implements from scissors to kitchen knives were kept under lock and key. He had nothing to cut the cable. He managed to dislodge one of the metal supports from his bed and each night rubbed it repeatedly against the metal frame, slowly honing an edge and then replacing it before morning. It took another month, but he finally had something capable of doing the job.

In the hour before dawn, Castle crept into Christina's room to reveal his plan for the next night. She would stand ready as he sabotaged the power to the house. When he was sure that the alarms were off, the two of them would take off into the surrounding woods and keep going until they found some way to contact help. Castle hoped that they would have enough of a start to avoid capture.

Castle endured another day of questioning and drug-induced unconsciousness and waited anxiously through the hours of darkness until he could put his plan into effect. He knocked softly at Christina's door to let her know he was in motion and then carefully found his way to the rear corner of the house, using moonlight through the windows as his only illumination. He was starting to work on the cable when the lights snapped on. Marcel's thugs stood, pointing their guns at him. Marcel stood behind his men with Christina smiling at his side.

Castle stared at her. "Christina, why?"

"Money, Rick, of course. Sorry big brother. I was your watcher and I did the job I was paid for. Little sister finally beats you at a game."

"Monsieur Castle, your timing could not have been more perfect," Marcel informed him. "Our need for you is at an end. You have given us what we needed to know."

"What? What did you need to know?" Castle asked bewildered. "I didn't know anything."

"Oh, but you did," Marcel disagreed. "Michael Bellow's games, they taught it to you and Michael Bellow's cookies helped you to learn it. We had only retrieve it, and now that retrieval is done, and so are you."

The butt of a gun connected with Castle's temple and as white lights flashed in front of his eyes he felt the familiar prick of a needle in his arm.

* * *

Beckett's cell rang in late evening, while she was still at the 12th. The name displayed on Beckett's caller ID was one she hadn't seen in months, Sergeant Tagger of the Hamptons police. "Detective Beckett," Tagger reported "this may be nothing, but some kids on horseback reported some activity near some cabins that have been long abandoned and condemned. We're going to check it out in the morning. If you think there's any chance your fiancé might be involved, you might want to get up here."

Seeing the look on her face, Esposito asked, "Was that about Castle?"

"I don't know," Beckett replied. "Probably not. But there's something in the Hamptons that they're going to check on in the morning. I'm going up there."

"If you're going, so am I" Esposito told her.

"And me," Ryan added.

"All right," Beckett agreed. "We can go to the Hamptons house tonight and meet with Sergeant Tagger in the morning.

Castle was swimming in twilight. He thought he had felt himself being brought onto a plane and then taken off again. The smell of pine reached his nose as he was painfully dumped on a thin mattress. A voice sneered triumphantly. "By the time anyone finds him, they'll think he was here all along until he died. And we'll leave them a little surprise." There was a faint snap as metal bit into Castle's wrist.

Tracks from an SUV and multiple footprints led to the tumbledown cabin. Sergeant Tagger, Beckett, Esposito and Ryan approached, guns drawn. The building looked deserted. The door was unlocked. As Ryan and Esposito covered her, Beckett pushed the door open cautiously. She gasped as she saw Castle handcuffed to an old metal bed and started to run to him.

"Kate, wait!" Castle rasped. "Booby trap."

Esposito scanned the cabin using his Mag Lite. A glint of light reflected from a trip wire slung across the cabin. Carefully he traced it and cut it free from a bomb. He nodded to Beckett.

Kate freed Castle from his cuffs, smoothed back his now unruly hair and kissed the dry lips in a fully bearded face. "How are you?" she asked.

Castle stroked her cheek. "Never been better."

Epilogue

Castle lay in his sumptuous bed in the Hamptons house surrounded by Alexis, Martha and Kate. I can't believe that Michael Bellows would do so a thing!" Martha exclaimed. "Drugging you and the other kids with cookies and feeding you God knows what from video games. It's unbelievable! And then that Christina, such a sweet little girl, like a sister to you."

"Well sweet little girls can grow up into nasty women, Mother." Castle squeezed Alexis' hand. "Not my little girl of course."

"Castle, do you have any idea what was on those video games?" Kate asked.

"Not a clue," Castle answered, "not even one of my conspiracy theories. But Kate, I'm going to find out. This is a mystery I need to solve."

"I know you do," Kate assured him, "and I want to help."

"So do I," Alexis added.

"Well let's give Kate and your father some time, shall we," Martha suggested, pulling Alexis from the room.

"Love you, Dad," Alexis called.

"Love you too," Castle answered.

Kate climbed onto the bed next to him. "I never stopped looking for you," Kate told him. "I never would have."

"I know," Castle told her, "and I would never have stopped trying to come back to you."

Kate snuggled into the warmth her lover's arms. They were both home.


End file.
